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Famine mortality over the long run

Famine mortality rates have fallen abruptly to much lower levels in recent decades compared to earlier periods.

We published a comprehensive dataset of famine mortality over the last 150 years – the outcome of several months of work that brings together a range of sources on particular famines into one place. In this article, we show that, despite the uncertainty that surrounds mortality estimates for many individual famines, the overall long-run trend is clear: in recent decades, famine mortality rates have fallen abruptly to much lower levels compared to earlier periods. In a second article, we discuss some of the reasons for this decline.

Long-term trends in global famine mortality

Compared to earlier historical periods, very few people have died in famines in recent decades. Here, we show two bar charts based on our dataset of famines. The blue bars show the number of famine deaths in each decade since 1860. The number of famine deaths varies hugely from decade to decade, depending on the occurrence of individual catastrophic famines. Nevertheless, the last four decades have seen low numbers of famine deaths by historical standards.

The number of famine victims by decade, 1860s-2010s1

The red bars show famine mortality relative to the growing world population over this time. Viewed in this way, the trend is all the more notable. The chart shows the rate of famine deaths globally, expressed as the number of people dying each year per 100,000 people in the world population. The chart presents this rate averaged across each decade since 1860. You can see that the famine mortality rate fell to very low levels over the second half of the 20th century onwards.

The rate of famine deaths by decade, 1860s-2010s2

The sharp reduction in famine mortality represents "one of the great unacknowledged triumphs of our lifetime", as famine researcher Alex de Waal describes it.3

As de Wall explains, a continued decline is by no means assured: the future of famine will depend largely on the nature and prevalence of war. However, as we discuss here, the long-run developments that have contributed to the sharp decline in famine mortality do suggest that the type of catastrophic famine seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very unlikely to return.

Famines by world region since 1860

Increasingly limited parts of the world are affected by famine

The geographic spread of famines has also reduced over this period, as we can see in these two charts, which give two ways of visualizing famine deaths by continent.

While in earlier periods, Asia suffered heavily from major famines, this came to a halt over the mid-20th century. Since then, famines have almost exclusively been restricted to Africa, with the famine in North Korea being a stark exception.

Famines by world region, 1860s-20164
Famine deaths by world region, 1860s-20162

Victims of individual famines

This chart shows the estimated number of people dying in individual famines since the 1860s, based on our dataset of famines. The length of each line shows the duration of the famine, and the color shows the continent in which the famine occurred.

Number of deaths and duration of individual famines, 1860s-20162

What this chart does not show, however, is the significant uncertainty that surrounds many of these estimates. As we discuss in our section on Data Quality, historical famine estimates are frequently based on very scant demographic information, and even where such evidence is available, there is still disagreement in its interpretation.

As such, many of the famines included in our dataset are associated with a wide range of plausible mortality estimates. In our data, these are represented by upper- and lower-bound estimates, with the mid-point being shown in the visualization above. Two apt examples are the famines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which took place amidst the Second Congo War beginning in 1998, and that of North Korea from 1995 to 1999. These famines stand out in recent decades for their particularly high mortality. But in both cases, the range of mortality estimates available in the literature is large, with high and low estimates varying by several millions of deaths.5

Where such differences are present, our midpoint estimates are clearly very sensitive to our choice of upper and lower bounds. Given that more accurate estimates often emerge with time, we have not simply taken the highest and lowest figures published in the public domain. As noted by the World Peace Foundation“Generally speaking, better demographic calculations lead to lower estimations of excess deaths than those provided by journalists and other contemporary observers." Rather, we have sought to select upper and lower estimates based on the balance of opinion in commonly cited sources, all of which are detailed (for each individual event) in our dataset of famines. Inevitably, though, this meant us taking a position in some controversial cases, discussed in detail.

But whilst the number of deaths caused by individual famines is often subject to a good deal of uncertainty, the overall trend over time is very clear: compared to earlier historical periods, far fewer people have died in famines in recent decades. Whether we consider high or low estimates or something in between does not affect this conclusion.

Endnotes

  1. The data used for this visualization can be found in the table at the bottom of this entry. If a range of famine victims is shown in the table, then the average is used here. For famines that straddle two decades, the number of victims is assigned to decades proportionately to the number of years falling in each decade.

    Famines for which no estimate for the number of victims has been found or those below 1000 deaths are excluded.

  2. The data used for this visualization can be found in the table at the bottom of this entry. If an upper and lower figure for famine victims is shown in the table, then the average is used here. For famines that straddle two decades, the number of victims is assigned to decades proportionately to the number of years falling in each decade.

    Famines for which no estimate for the number of victims has been found or those below 1000 deaths are excluded.

  3. de Waal, A., The end of famine? Prospects for the elimination of mass starvation by political action, Political Geography (2017)

  4. The data used for this visualization can be found in the table at the bottom of this entry. If an upper and lower figure for famine victims is shown in the table then the average is used here. For famines that straddle two decades, the number of victims are assigned to decades proportionately to the number of years falling in each decade.

    Famines for which no estimate for the number of victims has been found or those below 1000 deaths are excluded.

  5. Democratic Republic of Congo, 1998-2007

    Upper-bound mortality estimate: 5.4 million (International Rescue Committee 2007 report)

    Lower-bound mortality estimate: 863,000 – 2009/10 (Human Security Report)

    The great disparity between these two estimates largely lies within the assumptions made about the number of people that would have died anyway in the absence of the Second Congo War, with the Human Security Report arguing that the IRC estimate adopts an overly optimistic counterfactual. So called 'excess mortality' estimates are always highly sensitive to the choice of baseline mortality rate, but this is particularly true for crises that extend across several years such that the counterfactual trend in mortality has to be considered also. They also argue that the survey data on which the IRC estimate is based is, for some periods at least, unrepresentative of the country as a whole – a perennial issue in famine demography, given the typically patchy availability of data.

    North Korea, 1995-1999

    – Upper-bound mortality estimate: 240,000 (Spoorenberg and Schwekendiek, 2012))

    Lower-bound mortality estimate: 600,000 (Goodkind, West and Johnson, 2011))

    The number of people who died in the North Korean famine remains highly uncertain, largely due to the closed nature of the country. This has precluded access to official data and other channels of inquiry, such as surveys. Estimates range from the North Korean Government's 'quasi-official' estimate of 220,000 to the 3.5 million arrived at by South Korean NGO Good Friends Centre for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees by extrapolating from interviews conducted with refugees fleeing the country.

    More recent analyses have produced increasingly lower estimates, with a rough consensus that the sample of refugees upon which the 3.5 million figure was based – people from areas so badly affected that they sought to emigrate – was almost certainly unrepresentative of the country as a whole. See, for instance, Ó Gráda Famine: A Short History (2009), p.94 and Haggard and Noland (2005). Both our upper and lower estimates are, instead, based on the authors' attempts to reconstruct demographic trends between censuses conducted in 1993 and 2008, again contrasted to an assumed counterfactual mortality rate. Ho Il Moon's estimate of 336,000, published in a recent article for VOX, also falls in this interval. Again, it is based on a reconstruction of intercensal demography.

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:

Joe Hasell (2018) - “Famine mortality over the long run” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/famine-mortality-over-the-long-run' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-famine-mortality-over-the-long-run,
    author = {Joe Hasell},
    title = {Famine mortality over the long run},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2018},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/famine-mortality-over-the-long-run}
}
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